Pain, fear, doubt, deciet of the self and others, panic, anxiety, confusion, blurred haze of apathetic malaise, ill feelings of contempt, disdain, insecurity, defensiveness, as well as anger towards things, people, and ideas that seem threatening are the seeds of the fearful unknowingness that sinks its dark roots deep into our souls and causes one to turn one's fellow man into one's enemy and seperates us all. These seeds drive us to cling desperately to that which we find solace in for dread of the cold void nipping at our heels, but the source of the fear is nothing outside of us, it is our own lack of understanding and insecurity in admitting to weakness or facing the unknown.

It's easy to say, "Yeah, yeah, we all have fears and insecurities we'd rather not talk about or face because it's too frightening and painful, but so what? What do you expect ME to do about it?" Nothing except acknowledge that which you already know, not just claim to know or accept as a cliché remark in the neverending cycle of confusion and passe awareness, but truly know and understand that the very real feelings, desires, fears, ambitions, and struggles we all go through in the various stages of life are shared by all of us all the time. We wear our drama on our faces, even if we think it's hidden, and we carry the way things make us feel about ourselves and others with us, and it shapes how we treat ourselves and others.

How do we get past these emotional hang-ups and move past pride and allow ourselves to see where we are being arrogant and ignorant about things, where we let fear and insecurity limit our lives, and break out of these unneccessary prisons we've been forced to build under the weight of a history of intolerance, impatience, and apathy towards the importance of how we treat one another and ourselves as human beings, fallible and foolish as we are?

We must learn to open up and trust, and learn to take more priority and responsibility in how we think and behave, because rich or poor, exotic or plain, outgoing or reserved, the essence of who we truly are inside, the way we think and feel and how we let these things reflect upon the world through our actions leaves its mark on everything we do, and shapes our subjective reality.

Whether you think you're an island to yourself or not, you are always effecting everyone around you all the time. You make a statement in a certain tone of voice with a complex set of undertones indicating various implications of the meaning of your words with a particular set of expressions on your face and other people's understanding of your place in the world and their place in relation to you is effected immediately. Feelings are formed and interpretations are made and thus shape what everyone you meet thinks and does in reaction to your presence in their lives.

So how does one take responsibility and control? It sounds difficult and bothersome to pay attention to how we are effecting people, much less straining to peer inside our own heads and see how we react to our own behaviour. Why bother when it's easier to be a slave to the manipulations of our environment than try to learn to guide ourselves gracefully along the river of life. It's easier to accept bad situations and watch them, in a state of mental and emotional collapse, as they get worse and worse and cause our lives to close in on us, making us feel helpless.

Or we could care. We could love. We could take time to take a pause and take account of what's taking place instead of bulldozing forward through everything in a neverending string of one knee-jerk reaction after another. Problems will always exist to challenge our growth, but if we can work together in earnest desire for the wellbeing of ourselves and everyone around us, we can overcome the seperation that keeps us weak, ignorant, easily fooled, manipulated, and controlled, and understand what is really going on, what we really want and need, why we really feel the way we feel and think the way we think, and direct all our resources towards a lasting prosperity instead of a fleeting self-destructive spree of desperate scrambling at all that glitters, hoping somewhere out there, someday, you might find true gold, by which I don't mean the metal, or money, I mean the true realization of contentment, happiness, and fulfillment, the desire of which makes us fashion our dreams and ideas from base impluses in an attempt to understand and meet our ever-changing needs.